Tag Archives: Academy Award

I’m just a little girl lost in the momentI’m so scared but I don’t show itI can’t figure it out, it’s bringing me downI know I’ve got to let it go and just enjoy the showJust enjoy the show, just enjoy the show

This film having Brad Pitt as Beane shows how for the first time in history of Baseball player selection and rejection was done on the basis of mathematics and a scientific approach. It also show how this overcomes the struggle of defeating rich clubs/teams which could buy any player so easily. The good thing about the movie it has perfect balance of baseball and other story for non base lovers to like the movie equally.

The movie is inspirational and positive and worth watching for people who dare to dream. Its not just about winning sometimes but enjoying the every moment of the process.

This movie is for people who like History, Music and Literature. The movie goes around a young successful but distracted Hollywood screenwriter getting married who is passionate about literature and writing a novel and explores the Golden Era by his magical experiences at Mid Night in Paris.

Nominations received in Academy Awards (4):

Best Picture, Best Direction, Best Original Screenplay and Best Art Direction

Bottom Line: The movies has no action or fights but old music, art, historical people and places and horse cabs to fascinate you -:)

A R Rahman performed his Oscar-nominated song If I Rise from Danny Boyle‘s film 127 Hours, at the 83rd Annual Academy Awards. The composer had originally collaborated with Dido for this number. Dido, however, could not make it to the Oscar ceremony due to her advanced pregnancy. Singer Florence Welch took her place at the ceremony. So what did you think of the performance? Did Rahman do a good job? Sadly, Rahman lost out the award to Randy Newman for the song We Belong Together from the film, Toy Story 3.

Best adapted screenplay

The “West Wing” creator packed 163 pages worth of words into a two-hour movie. Not a single syllable is wasted. The instant-classic opening scene establishes the movie’s verbal style — a boobytrapped kind of banter — as Harvard whiz Zuckerberg repels a fresh-faced BU girl named Erica (Rooney Mara) with a toxic mixture of hubris and insecurity. And Sorkin sustains and deepens that style right up to the final shots of Zuckerberg staring enigmatically at Erica’s Facebook page.—Michael Sragow

Best original screenplay

Seidler’s eloquent and impassioned script brought to life a monarch surmounting personal obstacles to become every inch a king, and the complicated, moving bond between this proud, sensitive man and his demanding, unconventional speech therapist. But as Seidler told me in December, “This movie is also about something I’m very passionate about, which is the social contract — which is ignored at our peril, but is ignored continually right now. With privilege, with power, with wealth, comes responsibility and duty. [George VI] absolutely understood this and [Edward VIII] either didn’t or chose adamantly to deny it. His job was to be king and he quit his job. It’s like a certain recent governor of Alaska!”–Michael Sragow

Best cinematography

It imbued the wide-open spaces of the Choctaw Nation with palpable wintry textures and made the frontier night as bracing as the blaze of noon.–Michael Sragow

Best film editing

(Handout / February 10, 2011)

Will win/Should win:“The Social Network”

Alternately sinuous and snappy, the cutting brought an elegant punch to scenes that could have been just punchy. It navigated past and present and multiple perspectives with sureness and lucidity while conjuring an improbable momentum from the charges and counter-charges thrown everywhere from dorms to deposition rooms.–Michael Sragow

Best cinematography

(Kevin Winter, Getty Images / January 7, 2011)

Should win: “The Social Network”

It not only captures the ambience of Ivy League clubs and classrooms and Northern California start-ups. It also expresses the film’s “Rashomon”-like insistence on the unknowability of “the truth” with every evocative placement or turn of the camera. Michael Sragow

Best supporting actor

(Getty Images / February 8, 2011)

Will win/Should win: Geoffrey Rush

Yes, Colin Firth is magnificent as stuttering King George VI, but his performance wouldn’t be possible without Rush’s superb and generous acting. Rush anchors the whole film with his rare capacity to express thought as well as emotion; he finds the full comic and dramatic range to his role as an eccentric speech therapist. .–Michael Sragow

Best actor

(Pascal Le Segretain, Getty Images / February 16, 2011)

Will win: Colin Firth

As the stammering King George VI in “The King’s Speech,” who finds the British crown thrust upon him as fascism sweeps through Europe, Firth never goes for simple pathos or poignancy. He intermingles deep shyness, stubborn pride, and even a touch of in-grown arrogance.–Michael Sragow

Best actor

(Reuters / January 26, 2011)

Should win: Jesse Eisenberg

As Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Network,” Jesse Eisenberg is an electric combination of laser-like intellect and offbeat instinct. He conveys the hidden impulses and emotions in a character who can express himself only in code. He also suggests the vision, intellect and originality that make Zuckerberg a formidable force. And as a boy-man who can’t play well with others, Eisenberg plays well with everybody — especially Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake and Rooney Mara.–Michael Sragow

Best supporting actress

(Reuters / February 17, 2011)

Will win/Should win: Hailee Steinfeld

When the Academy placed young Steinfeld in the best supporting actress category, she instantly overshadowed a field of strong competitors. To quote Donna Tartt’s terrific afterword to the 2004 edition of Charles Portis’ original novel, Steinfeld’s character, Mattie Ross, “is the perfect soldier, despite her sex. She is as tireless as a gun dog; and while we laugh at her single-mindedness, we also stand in awe of it.” Steinfeld embodied this heroine right down to the marrow. She extracted every bit of humor, nuance and rhythm from the complicated dialogue. To call Steinfeld a natural is to do her an injustice. Her skill set is uncanny. –Michael Sragow

Best actress

(Jason Merritt, Getty Images / January 31, 2011)

Will win: Natalie Portman

In “Black Swan,” Portman is valiant — until you realize that her director is always shooting her from the waist up, she convinces you that she’s a superb dancer. But, off her toes, she can’t do much of anything here except act urgently confused, especially around her slimy-genius choreographer (Vincent Cassel) and her bitter, controlling mother (Barbara Hershey).–Michael Sragow

Best actress

(AFP/Getty Images / February 7, 2011)

Should win: Annette Bening

Annette Bening is funny, tough and veracious as a devoted lesbian mom who’s enduring a marital mid-life crisis. When she sings a Joni Mitchell song a cappella, in character, unplugging wells of tenderness and yearning, for everyone in the theater, like the title of the song, she’s “All I Want.”–Michael Sragow

Best animated feature film

(Handout/Pixar / January 25, 2011)

Will win/Should win: “Toy Story 3”

“Toy Story 3” is both a robust coming-of-age comedy-drama and a day care center version of a prison-break thriller. It’s full of giddy farce and heart-stopping climaxes: it puts passion and invention into rounding off a beloved series. –Michael Sragow

Best direction

(Reuters / January 22, 2009)

Will win/Should win: David Fincher

Every step he took, every move he made — with the camera and his blocking and his actors — brought us closer to his characters. His visual dexterity imbued the tricky constructions of a hyper-verbal script with visceral force. Most important, he did what every great director must do: convince the audience that life was spilling out from the corners of the frame.–Michael Sragow

Best picture

(Reuters / January 25, 2011)

Will win/Should win: “The Social Network”

Is Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg a heartless villain or a hero in disguise? Are the Winklevoss Twins lovable throwbacks to a gentlemanly era or semi-loathsome embodiments of Old School entitlement? You could read a half-dozen different answers to these questions on the opinion pages of the New York Times alone! With unbridled wit and vitality, “The Social Network” brought universal themes — the demands of friendship and decency, the privileges of genius — into a swift, volatile flow of action. It created a complex contemporary environment pressured by the need for speedy accomplishment and riddled with disconnected personalities. No movie this year had more to say about the way we were five (or 50) years ago and the way we live right now.–Michael Sragow

LOS ANGELES: Hollywood polished up its golden boy statue, the Oscar, for its glittery awards ceremony on Sunday with“The King’s Speech” and “The Network” leading the field for the world’s top movie honors.

The presentation will feature two youthful co-hosts, actorsJames Franco, 32, and Anne Hathaway, 28, marking the first time a man and woman have presided over the Oscars. Hathaway is the youngest person to emcee what is annually the second most-watched TV show in the United States and broadcast live in more than 200 countries worldwide.

Producers say the ceremony, at which more than 20 awards will be given out in just over three hours, is meant to connect movie fans to the Hollywood of old, while also giving a nod to the future with web cams andTwitter feeds.

Where Oscar is concerned, fans saw “Social Network,” which tells of the rise of Facebook from college-oriented website to global phenomenon, scoop up many early critics awards.

But as the season played out, “The King’s Speech,” which tells of a stuttering British king facing his personal demons, was embraced by numerous movie professional groups.

Now, the two will face-off for the Oscars with “King’s Speech” tipped as the favorite.

Colin Firth, in the starring role of King George VI in “King’s Speech,” is widely expected to win best actor because he has claimed most honors from both critics and industry groups. Similarly,Christian Bale and Melissa Leo, both in boxing drama “The Fighter,” are front-runners in supporting categories.

Jerome Maida’s mission wasn’t entirely dissimilar from that of Oscar-nominated “Social Network” screenwriterAaron Sorkin: By dint of research and glint of imagination, their job was to create a fleshed-out story that spins the largely mysterious person and caricatured persona of Mark Zuckerberg into an utterly compelling character.

As a result, Maida, a freelance comics writer and journalist who penned the new “Mark Zuckerberg: Creator Facebook,” can appreciate more than most what Sorkin accomplished.

“Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay for ‘The Social Network’ is utterly brilliant,” Maida tells Comic Riffs. “It reminded me of those incredibly intelligent, talky comedies like ‘His Girl Friday,’ only with a modern edge and sensibility. My comic is verbose — necessarily so — but one scene of ‘Social Network’ would have filled the whole thing.

“That’s a tribute to him, that he could write something with that many words and still have it all be incredibly sharp, cool and intense.”

Such immense praise prompts the question, then: Does Sorkin’s story deserve to win the Academy Award tonight for Best Adapted Screenplay? (The film’s other noms include Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director.)

“If it doesn’t win for Best Screenplay,” Maida pronounces, “it will be one of the greatest injustices in Oscar history.”

The result is the “giant-sized” 48-page bio-comic by Maida and illustrated by Sal Field. The Vancouver-based Bluewater Comics — which publishes bio-comics of famous entertainment and political figures — released the Zuckerberg book on Wednesday.

“I approached the story assignment as an opportunity to learn about a man who, though accomplished and rich beyond measure, very little is known,” Maida tells Comic Riffs. “Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton are in the news seemingly every day. Yet we hardly hear about Mark Zuckerberg. He’s not a media whore like Donald Trump, that’s for sure — and that’s what makes him all the more intriguing and fresh.

Some might read Maida’s take on Zuckerberg as being somewhat more sympathetic to the Facebook co-founder than Sorkin’s. As he did his research, what became Maida’s take on his profile subject?

“The more I learned about Zuckerberg, the more I became intrigued by him,” says Maida, whose previous writing assignments for Bluewater include bio-comics on Al Franken and Bill O’Reilly. “While he can certainly come off as cold and calculating, it is in a different vein from the way one might usually interpret those words. He is — or at least appears to be — on a different plane than most of us.

“Does it appear he screwed over a lot of people to get to where he is? Yes. But I try to give him the benefit of the doubt as well,” the Pennsylvania-based Maida tells us.

(Maida also notes that there plans for Bluewater’s Zuckerberg book to be made into an animated film, though he’s not yet clear what his involvement might be. Bluewater says the script has been optioned by Hayden 5 Media, whose president says the film would use a rotoscoping technique a la “A Scanner Darkly.”)

Ultimately, Maida says — who himself is a Facebook user — there is no denying the power of Zuckerberg’s creation.

“If you look even at clips of his ’60 Minutes’ segment a few years back, he still comes across as socially awkward to the point of bordering on socially inept,” Maida says, “yet he has created something that has changed the millions across the world socially interact with each other.

“If that is not the seed of an incredible story in a nutshell, I don’t know what is.”

If he is intense and understated onscreen, he is serene and modest off it. 3 of his co-stars from ‘The Fighter‘ have been nominated for Oscars in the acting category barring him. Mark Wahlberg spoke to Renuka Vyavahare on reports of being left out of the Oscar race, India, family life and passion for boxing!
Three of your co-stars have been nominated in the ‘Acting’ category of the Oscars. Do you feel left out, in spite of doing a brilliant job?
Of course not! My film is a strong contender in the Oscar race. I have no reasons to be upset. I’m a team player, personal laurels don’t matter as much as the entire film.

The Fighter has won 7 Oscar nominations. Which other film do you think as a tough competition?
I think all the films in the best film category are outstanding and are tough competition.

What made you take up ‘The Fighter’?
I like boxing and that’s why I wanted to do a boxing film since long so I thought of producing the film. Besides, it was Micky’s story, that inspired me to take up The Fighter

You’ve seen Micky Ward closely. What inspired you to make a film on his life?
Yes, I know Micky very well since long, I used to stay just 30 minutes away from his house and have seen his life unfold very closely. His hardships in life and his ability to get over his adversities and emerge as a hero was what inspired me to take up the role and the film.

You do look like a professional fighter in the film. How did you prepare yourself for the role?
I had to train myself for almost one and a half year to look and fight like a professional fighter. Micky and Dicky moved in to my house and we set up a boxing ring in my backyard, where Christian and I used to practice with Micky and Dicky. I had scenes where I had to take on Alfonso Sanchez, who was number 2 middle weight boxer in the world when we shot the movie!

You and Christian Bale had great chemistry.
Christian is like a brother. We both used to practice together and he was fun to hang around with. I think he has played the role of Dick Eklund, Micky Ward’s elder brother very well.

Any plans of visiting India?
Nothing on the cards right now but I can’t wait to visit India and would like to come as and when I get an opportunity.

Have you seen Indian films?
Yes, I have seen Lagaan and I loved it.

Are you following the Cricket World Cup?
I am not following the Cricket World Cup but I don’t mind catching up few matches if I have time on me.

Any moment in your life when you thought you were a true ‘Fighter’.
Well, there have been a lot of such moments. Life is all about facing difficulties and giving them a tough fight.

You have a huge family in the film and are still patient with each of them.
The fact that we are 9 siblings in real life and also in the film and the way this family fights against all odds and emerges as a winner was quite similar to my life and it was quite like living my own life on the celluloid.

I feel very honored to be one of the writers for The 83rd Annual Academy Awards hosted by Anne Hathaway and James Franco on ABC this Sunday night. So rather than watching the show with my wife, my kids and my friends at our usual Oscar party, I will gladly be somewhere backstage in a tux — no doubt sweating profusely and laughing loudly, as I tend to do in these situations. Having been sworn to secrecy, I will now tell you precisely nothing about the show that’s being produced this year by Don Mischer and Bruce Cohen. That said, I will throw caution to the wind and reveal exactly this much: The show’s going to be great. You’re invited. You should watch.

So, until the red carpet opens, here’s my suggested playlist for all your Oscar parties this year. As usual, I reached out to all the beautiful people who follow me on Twitter at @wildaboutmusic, and asked for their favorite songs related to the movies and Hollywood. And as always, they delivered the goods. My favorite tweet of all came from @mannweil — also known as the great songwriting team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil who were Oscar nominated for Best Original Song, “Somewhere Out There,” from An American Tail. They reminded me about “Saturday Night at the Movies” by The Drifters — a soulful pop masterpiece that they not only suggested, but also wrote.

Please add your own suggestions here — and no, you don’t have to actually have written the song — but it couldn’t hurt.